A solid strategy, an emphasis on customer satisfaction, and having the right people in the right roles are just some of the elements that set companies up to maximize shareholder value. Executives from Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, and Snowflake share their insights.
The most successful organizations often create their own new and unique paths to growth. But what are the common threads among the Fortune Future 50 list of fastest-growing companies?
The list, compiled every year since 2017 by Fortune magazine and Boston Consulting Group, highlights companies built to deliver robust growth.
“We pulled together data from finance, from people, from technology, from culture, from analyst calls, and everywhere and try to look for patterns of growth and innovative thinking,” said Johann Harnoss, partner and associate director for Innovation, a member of BCG’s Corporate Finance and Strategy practice, and a BCG Henderson Institute fellow. “These are not just companies that grow fast. These are also companies that do it profitably and create value for shareholders, employees, and everybody.”
Led by Ruth Umoh, leadership editor at Fortune, the recent conversation at the annual Workday customer event Workday Rising touched on finance, HR, technology, and culture—as well as the unique approaches business leaders take to address the challenges before them. Umoh asked what determined the four main factors tracked by the Fortune Future 50 list: strategy, technology and investments, people, and structure.
“We’re looking at more than 30 variables and thousands, if not millions, of data points,” Harnoss said. Yet so much of an organization’s growth track, he added, relied on its strategy and its people in order to focus and remain agile.
Brad Floering, vice president of finance at Snowflake, said the company opted for a usage-based fee model for customers of its cloud computing and data analytics platform. The reason? Because it only wanted to charge for the value customers were realizing.
"Everywhere from our business model to our customer interactions to our sales team, it’s just built into our DNA that we want to do what’s right by the customer."
Brad Floering
Vice President, Finance
Snowflake
Floering said the company is committed to its North Star of what’s best for the customer. “When you’re willing to do that, your customers will appreciate that and view you as a partner in their journey as well—and revenue will come. It’s been huge for our success.”
Snowflake ranked No. 1 on the 2023 Fortune Future 50 list. It uses Workday to run its finance and HR systems.
Heather Planishek, chief accounting officer at Palantir, also touted the value of a customer-first approach.
“It’s always been amazing to see the company run to the customer, whether it’s a soldier on the ground who needs our software in their hands immediately or it’s an engineer at a plant who needs the software to help do their job,” she said. “It’s really motivating to be behind a mission where you’re so customer-centric and running to the fire.”
Planishek said that the company operates in a way that treats the business as a customer as well. “When the business and our forward-deployed engineers are running with our customers, we’re right behind them and making sure we can help them succeed in any way.” Maintaining that focus on the customer, she added, comes from our leadership in “creating that culture of, ‘We have to do what it takes to get the job done.’”
Rust Ince-Schroeder, senior director for global people operations at Palo Alto Networks, noted that customers have to trust their cybersecurity provider. “As you can imagine, they’re trusting us with their assets, with their data, with their people,” he said. “Customer-first mentality is critical for us because at the end of the day, our customers have to believe, trust, and know that we’re going to be there for them when they need us most.”
Ince-Schroeder added that the company’s core values—execution, collaboration, disruption, inclusion, and integrity—were crowdsourced from its employees. “It’s really what they believed, what they saw day to day from each other and how they showed up for the customers,” he said.
Palo Alto Networks’ 18 acquisitions over the past six years, Ince-Schroeder said, were led by the company analyzing gaps in its existing portfolio and determining which companies would best fill those needs. Yet he also emphasized the importance of culture—in the target company and its leadership.
“From the top down, values are very critical,” Ince-Schroeder said.
Turning to a sports metaphor, Ince-Schroeder said it’s a coach’s job to look around corners.
For Palantir, the impetus for growth included a significant pandemic-era investment in its product to be able to serve customers remotely and efficiently. “We were forced to immediately turn on a dime for the success of our customers,” Planishek said. “It pivoted the whole company on a very intentional focus—and I do think that that was a turning point and almost created a new company.”
Palantir also retooled its sales team to meet burgeoning customer demand, particularly with AI, and changing its go-to market strategy in the process. “In my career, supporting Palantir to be able to meet our customers where they are, where their needs are, and to pivot the company to meet that moment has been very impactful,” Planishek said.
Since joining Snowflake in 2017, Floering said the company went from $20 million in revenue and grew exponentially. At the end of July 2024, it reported annual revenue of $3.206 billion. “That level of growth is staggering,” he said. “During that period, there’s always that worry about getting too far out in front of your skis.”
In response, the company uses Workday to right-size its hiring budgets in sales and engineering to meet growth according to the total addressable market.
Having the right teams focused on value creation is paramount, particularly at technology companies, Harnoss said. “Who are your makers? Who are your builders? And who are the marketers and sellers? That’s really the core.” As companies scale up, sometimes they forget their foundational principles, losing that sense of collaboration necessary across teams, he added.
Floering credited Snowflake’s former CEO for characterizing the type of people the company wanted to hire: “He wanted everybody to be the drivers and not the passengers along for the ride.”
Planishek calls the necessary approach from employees the “engineering mindset,” describing a work environment where people are driven to reinvent processes to retool when something no longer scales, or a “trusted culture of, ‘Let’s go do this exercise and figure out how can we process-improve going forward,” she said.
Planishek described how finance team members continue to take a wider view of the business and the implications for the organizations of what they do as they advance in their career. “The more you can create this broader culture of sharing I think goes a long way to train your team at all levels to set them up for success as they move into the next leadership level,” she said.
Planishek also said agility comes from the “founder vs. manager mindset” in avoiding bureaucracy and the hierarchy that comes with it. “Cross-functional relationships mean so much, and they bring so much more immediate value to the table,” she said.
"We all still operate our teams in that founder mindset, that start-up mode, even though we’ve seen tremendous growth along the way."
Heather Planishek
Chief Accounting Officer
Palantir
Turning to a sports metaphor, Ince-Schroeder said It’s a coach’s job to look around corners. “A big piece of agility is to be able to say, ‘I’m panning the landscape. I understand what’s going on. I’m anticipating what’s going on with the market, with our competitors, with our customers, because when we’re up against the bad guys, we can’t sit around and wait to be reactive,’” he added. “At the end of the day, it’s about getting ahead of what’s coming next.”
“Talent is key,” Ince-Schroeder said.
In the drive to build the best possible team, Palo Alto Networks used AI to build structured interviews, as part of its talent strategy. The company also uses Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) to support its people worldwide.
“Being able to discover talent, find talent, recycle talent, elevate talent, bring them into your company—that’s critical,” Ince-Schroeder said. “Your customers are diverse in every which way. We’re in 75 countries—diversity like race, gender, ethnicity, creed, thinking. It is everything. But if your customers are trying to work with you and you don’t respect them, respect their values, they’re not going to be your customers for long.”
Teams at Palantir look to find “the missing puzzle piece,” Planishek said. “We really try to come together and figure out what we’re hiring for. That way we know our must-haves vs. the icing on the cake.”
But planning for cross-functional partnerships is also important, Planishek added. “If I’m hiring you for the top-line team, I’m having you talk to the legal team, I’m having you talk to someone in the business that you’re going to be working with because they have a different perspective that maybe I wouldn’t have in the finance space.”
While that might make for an extended interview process, Planishek said it helps to suss out candidates who align with the organization’s values and culture.
When it comes to setting up for the future, it’s important for organizations to have a mission—and the right people, Floering said.
“Our employee retention is very good, and I think that’s because we’ve always had a clear focus of, ‘This is what we want to do. This is what we need to go execute. Let’s go do that as a company.’ And I think that’s led to employee satisfaction, as well as company success,” he added.
Harnoss said that when looking at fast-growing companies across the globe, there’s one common trait among them: “They are able to attract and retain the best and brightest people in the world,” he said. “That also means, from a company perspective, looking in pools that are often a bit overlooked.”
Skills-based hiring, Harnoss added, includes considering workers who may be on a visa. “If there’s one thing I can select from the many options that we have in front of us, it’s that aspect of global talent.”
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